How do I see the locations of my drives in Ubuntu Linux?

Question

So, there seem to be a couple ways drives are named. There is the /media/disk nomenclature and then the /dev/sda nomenclature. It looks like smartctl wants the /dev/ nomenclature, but I don't know how to figure out which of the 4 partitions is which /dev/sda/ Confusing the matter, I have /sdaX through 6 and it seems like it should only go through 3 (assuming starting at zero), though it does appear to skip 4. On a related note, the partition that keeps dropping out is a NTFS drive. There is a ton of data on it, so I don't really want to reformat to ext3, so are there any Linux tools to test NTFS partitions? I am no longer dual booting. I have been thinking about installing Windows in a VM, so if there are easier tools from Windows, that could be an option.

Answer 1

First of all the /dev ones... This is how the system refers to the device or hardware (hence why smartctl wants this path).

SATA drives are referred to as sd*, whereas older drives are named hd*.

The letter where the asterisk differentiates between drives, i.e. if you have two SATA drives then they will be named sda and sdb.

The number relates to the partition.

When you mount a partition/filesystem it needs a "mount point", usually in /mnt or /media . This doesn't relate to the hardware but rather the filesystem stored on that partition.

That is the best explanation I can give with my limited knowledge. There are tools you can use to visualise your drives - I'm sure a good partitioning tool will give you a good graphical representation with labels.

Ubuntuforums.org is your best bet.

Good luck!